Living with severe chronic pain, or forgetting the name of the person I’m interviewing.
Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, September 2012 source ↗
The question
What do you fear most?Originally asked
Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire
The exact prompt is fixed in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire and independently sustained in The Guardian's The Q&A over multiple decades.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Others on this question
View all 256 →Every actor has the same fear – ie, you’re never going to work again.
Yo-Yo Ma
Cellist
Very large bugs.
A world where greed rules.
At age 97 and counting, guess.
More from Terry Gross
View profile →The inability to stop talking about themselves when they’re not being interviewed.
A glass of wine, a good dinner with my husband, and a day ahead of me without a deadline is close enough.
Swiftly, painlessly, and old.
Their willingness to put up with my endless explanations about why I can’t see them because I’m under deadline.
More on identity & self
- Which trait in yourself do you like least? 239 answers
- As a child, what career or life did you imagine for yourself? 197 answers
- What most recently moved you to tears? 192 answers
- What does happiness look like for you when life is going well? 158 answers
- How would you sum yourself up in three words? 114 answers
- What fills you with the most pride? 103 answers
Also answered this
Dawn O’Porter, Anjelica Huston, Michelle Collins, Ai Weiwei, Marcus Brigstocke, Stanley Tucci
Search the directory for somebody in particular.
Explore further
- All identity & self questions
- The The Proust Questionnaire questionnaire — 5 questions from the same format
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject